Sunday, May 01, 2011

And newspapers such as the Boston Globe wonder why they're hanging on by their fingernails.

A Boston Globe reporter hid information on Barack Obama’s father for at least two years as she worked on a novel about the man’s life.

I posted the story on our web site and then watched to see what kind of reaction, if any, there would be. A small part of me wondered if The Independent — something we have worked so hard to establish as a credible and reliable community news source — would be written off as a bunch of crackpots. After all, we’re not even members of the Associated Press. We’re not even the third largest newspaper in mostly rural Mohave County.

Then, a day later, the Boston Globe published its story, written by reporter Sally Jacobs, which included the following:

”The INS documents, released to this reporter through a Freedom Of Information Act request in 2009 in the course of research on a biography of the elder Obama to be released in July, reveal Harvard’s crucial role in the tumultuous course of the president’s father’s life. The documents were made public Wednesday by the weekly newspaper, The Arizona Independent.”